Today we are heading down to the western side of the park and Weatherill Mesa.  There are four main places of interest on the Mesa:  The Long House (which requires a paid tour), the Step House, which is self-guided and features a Basketweaver Pithouse AND a cliff dwelling side-by-side, a viewpoint from which one can see a house called only Nordenskiöld Site #16 (Gustaf Nordenskiöld is the Swede I mentioned yesterday who did a lot of the work identifying and interpreting artifacts found here before absconding with a good many of them), and a trail to the Badger House community, which is a collection of pithouses from the 7^th century. 

First, though, we had to navigate breakfast.  We would need to leave an hour before the tour started in order to get down there and then to walk the ¾ mile to the trailhead.  So that meant leave at 8.  So that meant be at breakfast by 7, since we have no idea how that’s going to work, and we have to hustle up lunch.  So THAT means set an alarm for 6.  (Boo!  Alarms on vacation are bad, but sometimes you just have to do it!)  As it turned out, the breakfast setup is pretty efficient.   It’s a cafeteria style service, so you’re not waiting for table service.  We also beat the big tour group into breakfast by about 5 minutes, so we weren’t stuck behind 40 people.  We were able to pick up lunch (we had a choice between Mexican Street Corn Salad, Mexican Street Corn Salad, and Mexican Street Corn Salad, so we opted for Mexican Street Corn Salad) at the same time we paid for breakfast.  We were first in line for the morning, and the cashier had some trouble getting the system going, so she had to ring everything up twice, and then she overcharged us, so she had to process a refund.  All of this was infuriating the guy behind us, who was apparently in a tearing hurry to get somewhere.  I get it, Dude.…things just don’t run smooth!

We also made a run past the registration desk to complain again about the phone, which I consider to be a security issue, as that is the access to 911, should we need help.  We also reported that the shower gel (which is what there is in place of soap) is empty.  The new 12-year-old at the desk didn’t look any more enthusiastic about the phone than the one yesterday (still not taking bets that it will get fixed), but she perked up a bit about shower gel, as claimed she would report that to housekeeping.   We shall see.  I give it a 1 in 10 chance that the shower gel is filled by the time we get back.

We got out in plenty of time, however, to make our tour start.

We had tickets for the first Long House tour of the day, which turned out to be an advantage, despite the rushing around a bit in the morning, because when we got to the Long House, it was empty.  The tours, are ranger-assisted, but not ranger-led (which means that you can spend as much time as you like in the Long House, and you can choose to listen to the ranger or not, as you like) come thick and fast—one every half-hour, and the place gets crowded with the stragglers from one or two tours ahead of you and all the new people from the current tour.  We had no stragglers to contend with.

Under the heading of “Huh?”:  There is a big sign at the parking lot that says “For the Long House tour, proceed down this path .75 miles to the trail head.”  As we were approaching the path, a man corralled a ranger who was working on another trail and asked, “The sign says to walk . 75 miles to the trailhead for the Long House tour, so should I walk down there?”  I always told my students that it was not true that there are no stupid questions; the stupid question is the one you already know the answer to.  This guy not only already knew the answer, but actually stated it in his question.  Must have been too early in the morning for him.

We toddled off down the path and made it to the trailhead a few minutes before the rangers showed up.  There were two headed down to Long House, where they would be stationed to answer questions, and one to guard the gate and make sure everyone who enters has a ticket. Before she let anyone through, she gave us the safety talk:  this is a strenuous walk.  It’s not long (about ¾ of a mile round-trip), but you’re at 7200 feet and there is a 130’ drop in elevation.  Coming back, that means a 130’ rise in elevation.  That’s like climbing the stairs of a 13-story building.  There are also stairs followed by a series of switchbacks, and, to get up into Long House, two 15-foot ladders.   If anyone has heart problems or respiratory problems, you should really rethink this tour. No one rethought, but one woman started down and then turned back when she saw what the stairs looked like.  No doubt a wise decision.

As coming back was going to be at our own speed, I knew I would be fine.  I can make it up the grade—even at 7200’—but not fast.

The trip down and back is definitely worth it.  The Long House is a spectacular piece of architecture, even today, nearly 1000 years after it was built.  The ranger on our shift, Louann, gave a really excellent presentation (NPS rangers very often do!), which not only explained the features we should look at but also put the whole thing in human context.  Here are some of the points she made:

1.     We came down to Long House by the sissy path.   This path with the switchbacks, and the concrete stairs did not exist in 1200 CE.  Back then, the people who lived here climbed up and down to and from the top of the cliff using hand and footholds that they carved into the side of the cliff.  We can’t see them from Long House, but they are still there.  (I can’t even imagine.)

2.     Different people did things differently, just as they do today.  She illustrated this point by showing a beautifully and meticulously built wall and contrasted it to one right next to it which is a lot sloppier.  She made the point that maybe the guy who built the second wall was in a hurry because he had a wife about to give birth and needed a house NOW.  Or maybe this was the first wall he ever built.  Or maybe he just didn’t care about the artistry of wall-building like the first guy did.  We will never know, but it’s interesting to see how different people did things differently.

3.     These houses were tiny.  One room might be 8’x8’ or even smaller, and each family might have two rooms.   The houses tended to spread horizontally, with your two rooms side-by-side, rather than going up so one room was on top of the other.  The building was four- to five-stories high, however, so other families lived on top of your house, if you were on the bottom floor.  To get to the higher rooms, you had to pass through all the houses below yours, and sometimes you had to also pass horizontally through some in order to get to a place where there was a ladder.  Everyone, she suggested, knew everyone else’s business.  No secrets in a community like that!

4.     The ceilings were very short.  Skeletal evidence from the site shows that the people living around 1000-1200 CE were about 5’ – 5’5”, but even for them, the ceilings were pretty short. She didn’t say, but I’m guessing that this was to maximize space—the more floors we can stack on each other the more families can have houses here.

5.     In answer to the question of why, after 600 years of living on top of the mesas the people would have decided to undertake this tremendous and extraordinarily difficult project of building and living in cliff houses, she said that we don’t know for sure, but it is believed that overpopulation became a big problem.   So many people had arrived here to farm by the 11^th century that the resources had been badly stripped.  The trees were largely Pinyon Pines, which are very slow-growing, and once they were gone, there would be no more for many years—decades, even.  (We read some information about the Pony Fire of 2000 which burned this mesa, saying that it will actually be centuries before there is a mature Pinyon Pine forest here again. Later we heard a ranger say that that fire burned exceptionally hot, so it destroyed the soil, which delays the regrowth that much more.)  By about 1000 CE, resources were very short, and people were having trouble feeding their children.  Present-day archaeologists and park staff speculate that members of the various clans started turning on each other in fighting over food and water, but that this kind of infighting was anathema to the peace-loving Pueblo people.  In order to protect themselves and their resources, families that wished to stay in the area moved down the cliff into these cliff dwellings, which were incredibly hard to approach and in which it was easy to protect food supplies which had been stored for winter.  

6.     In answer to the question of why everyone left the area, Louann said again that they don’t know, but that it seems likely that the people who stayed here at Mesa Verde were getting reports from places like present-day Albuqurque and Santa Fe where there are rivers that living there is good.  There’s plenty of water, and harvests are excellent.  And, she suggested, “no one has bopped me on the head trying to take my food away for quite some time!”  It’s all supposition, but it’s logical supposition, and it remembers that these people were people, who wanted to make a good life for their families—and probably wanted to live and work near their families and friends.

7.     The people did not just disappear from here.  She said that it used to be taught in schools that the Anasazi just disappeared entirely and were never heard from again.  She said that this is a very offensive interpretation to the present-day Pueblo people, as it just erases their ancestors (who were NOT, as we saw earlier, “Anasazi”) from history.   In fact, there are 21 Pueblos descended from the Ancient Pueblo People in the four-corners area today, and many of those people know where their ancestors lived, and some even know which cliff house they lived in.

She told us a lot of interesting things about the features of the building, but I will put those in the notes for the photos.

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This is an excellent tour, and I recommend it highly if you’re ever visiting Mesa Verde and you are up to the walking.  Well worth the trouble (and the cost, which is only $8 a person).

We left the Long House and hiked back up the trail, making it back to the gate by 10:30, which is just the 90 minutes that the brochure suggests that the tour will take.  I found the climb back up to be strenuous, but easier, actually, than I had expected.  The problem is that it is still uphill, through gradually, all the way back to the car for another ¾ of a mile!  This is no easy feat for people--or at least me!—who live in a house that is almost exactly 300’ above sea level!

Tim wanted next to take the walk down to the Step House, which is a much shorter walk (about ¾ of a mile round-trip total—no ¾ mile lead-in), but which required another 100’ drop and then climb in elevation, and I thought maybe I shouldn’t try it.  So I read park information while he went down there.  He took some nice photos, which I will post with descriptions.  The Step House features a pithouse side-by-side with the cliff house, so you can see the difference in the way people lived over a 600-year span.

We ate our Mexican Street Corn Salads in the roofed picnic area, and then decided to walk down to the Nordenskiöld #16 overlook.  Gustaf Nordenskiöld, when he came here in 1891, numbered the various sites he worked on, and this particular one doesn’t have a modern name like Long House (#12) does.  You can’t get to Nordenskiöld #16, but you can get to a spot across the canyon from it and from there you have a beautiful view.  When you look at the photos, notice how far up to the top of the cliff it is—and the people who lived here (about 50 in this site) went up there every day in the growing season, at least, to farm, and climbed back down again at the end of the day, using the same kind of hand- and foot-holds that were used at Long House.

It started raining—lightly—just as we got back to the parking lot from this last walk.  This was pretty much all we had planned for the day anyway; unfortunately, a big chunk of the park that we had planned on seeing is closed right now, so we have some extra time.  It is supposed to rain all day tomorrow, as well, so we will have to wait and see how much we are going to be able to see.  We can at least do the drive around the other loop which is open (on the east side of the park), but whether we can get out and take any walks remains to be seen.

Back in the lodge, while awaiting our 8:15 dinner reservation, I got caught up on all these blogs and we tried one more time to get the phone, which was not fixed while we were gone, fixed and the shower gel, which was not filled while we were gone, filled.   This time, when I got to the head of the line, the person I was talking to was Damien N., the maintenance manager.  He apologized, and he said that this is the first time he’s heard about the phone.  I told him I had no trouble believing that at all.  While he was talking to me, he was pulling out a replacement phone and hooking up the handset.  He said he would take care of it and the shower gel (clearly not his job) right away.  Two other people who were there behind the desk and looked like managerial sorts asked who I had talked to previously.  Sounds like the two who failed to report might be in for a little talking to.

We went downstairs to the one room in the place which gets actual Internet service and checked email, and by the time we got back to the room, we had a working phone.  If you just get to the right person, the job gets done.  The problem is getting to the right person!

Dinner at 8:15; report to come.  Perhaps this will run more smoothly than last night…!

After dinner report:  All went smoothly!  We went down 15 minutes early, just in case they could seat us, and they did.  The dinner was excellent, and the waiter didn’t make any mistakes.  I saw Damien N. again to tell him thank you one more time for fixing our phone and filling the shower gel.  And when we got back, there was a huge Mule deer right under our balcony.  Nice finish to the day.